Automation of Power BI Gateway Server Administration

[trutz]

Hi all,

I screened the the possibilities of automating the Power BI Gateway Server administration, notably the parts focussing on the individual server nodes using PowerShell.
I noticed the following omissions in the Cmdlets:

• Adding a server to an existing cluster
  • There's an almost two year old idea on this topic, which never received any consideration: Microsoft Idea (powerbi.com)
• Updating a server in a cluster
  • The PowerShell cmdlet just installs the gateway software gateway fresh and new
  • An auto-update option as a workaround seems to be a dormant idea for some time: Microsoft Idea (powerbi.com)

Any hints for options working without the official cmdlets or if available, if any work is being done on this part?
Thanks for your help,
Trutz

[lbendlin]

Right. I voted for it.

[lbendlin]

In most enterprise scenarios these cmdlets are useless as they do not account for the required configuration changes that you must make in the gateway VM  (proxy settings, spooler folder and report folder settings, stream settings etc).

Auto updating gateway versions is foiled by the frequent inability of the update process to restart the service after install/update is complete.

How often are you planning to add/remove gateway cluster members?  Are you trying to automate something that doesn't need automating?

[trutz]

Hi @lbendlin ,
Thanks for your reply. 
I had my questions from an infrastructure-as-code perspective, where basically all infrastructure should be deployed and configured in a fully automated manner, e.g. gateways per region or per data provider. As the gateways receive regular updates, automating that part would also be beneficial in reducing administrative overhead.
I could imagine that the settings part could be overcome by stopping the gateway services and modifiying the config files, then restarting the service using regular PowerShell/Batch commands (e.g. net start or start-service). But registering a node server to a gateway cluster would be something, I'm missing.

[lbendlin]

Add-DataGatewayCluster (DataGateway) | Microsoft Learn

[koswalt99]

Ibendlin, Is there a way to use the "Add-DataGatewayCluster" command to add a new gateway to an existing cluster? That is the first question Trutz is asking.  From a purely automation/IaC perspective, there needs to be a way to add a new gateway to an existing cluster using PowerShell.  There is a command to remove a member.  What we need is a way to add a member.  Does your link provide that?

[lbendlin]

You can run all these API calls from Powershell via Invoke-RestMethod. Having said that - i have not tried adding a cluster member programmatically (for the above stated reasons).

[trutz]

Hi @lbendlin,
The Rest-methods are no use, because there are no APIs that support adding a gateway cluster member nor operating on the local server machine. 

[lbendlin]

If this is important to you please consider voting for an existing idea or raising a new one at https://ideas.powerbi.com

[trutz]

Did so already, see first post of this thread...